The Trip

Part of the special series NACHTBLENDE

Nachtblende: TRIBUTE TO THE KING OF CULT // In a double feature with THE WILD ANGELS

‘The Trip as written by Jack Nicholson and directed by Roger Corman might be the most authentic point-by-point recreation of what it is like to take LSD.’ nathaxnne on Letterboxd

With Jack Nicholson on the script and Peter Fonda & Dennis Hopper in front of the camera, Roger Corman's attempt to visualise an LSD trip, along with THE WILD ANGELS, seems to be the precursor to Hopper's EASY RIDER. Legend has it that Nicholson wrote the material during a single trip. Sounds legit! In a double feature with THE WILD ANGELS.

Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) is a film director in the throes of divorce and a crisis of meaning. The promise of the hyped expansion of consciousness through LSD comes at just the right time. Initially in the presence of the endeavoured trip-sitter John (Bruce Dern), but soon all over the place when he breaks out and wanders alone through Los Angeles...

As with THE WILD ANGELS, Corman took the research process for THE TRIP very seriously. He wanted to know what he was talking about: ‘I approached acid much the way I approached Freud and analysis. I did research. I read Timothy Leary, who believed you should trip with somebody you knew and be in a beautiful place. I got together a group of friends and decided to take my trip up north around Big Sur [...] I spent the next seven hours face down in the ground, beneath a tree, not moving, absorbed in the most wonderful trip imaginable,’ Corman recalls in his autobiography.

Whether or not an adequate staging of an LSD trip has been achieved remains to be seen. But THE TRIP is definitely an immensely elaborate and cinematically escalating exceptional work that culminates in an overwhelming storm of editing in the final third. Cinema hypnosis, nobody will stumble out of here completely sober!

‘More than plot, I wanted an impressionistic, free-form trip in every sense: a straight guy spends eight, ten hours tripping his brains out, comes down. The trip ends, the film ends. What's happened to him? Where has he gone? He is reborn, his life continues, transformed.’

From HOW I MADE A HUNDRED MOVIES AND NEVER LOST A DIME by Roger Corman